Draft Prospect Watch: New Mock Draft and Updated Rankings

Since February, we’ve been profiling two players a week who were possibilities to be selected when the Pittsburgh Pirates make the tenth overall pick in the 2018 MLB draft. In our Live Q&A yesterday, we announced a special for the draft. We’re offering a big discount of 18% off from now through the draft, so that you can follow all of our updates.To get the discount, use the code MLBDRAFT for an Annual subscription, or MLBDRAFT3 for a Top Prospect Plan.

The three-day draft begins on June 4th and will include all of the picks through the first two rounds. The Pirates also have the 36th overall pick, so there’s a chance we have already profiled that player as well. At the bottom of this article you’ll find links to the 27 players who have been profiled here this draft season.

Since the draft is now just nine days away, we switched up the Saturday article to look at a new mock draft released yesterday by Jim Callis of MLB Pipeline. From here until the draft, there will be more mock drafts coming out, usually with a lot on the morning/afternoon of the first day of the draft. The draft begins at 7 PM, so a lot of late rumors can change things up on that last day.

Callis and Jonathan Mayo seem to be leaning towards the Pirates taking a high school pitcher. In this new mock draft, Callis has the Pirates taking Grayson Rodriguez, a big right-handed pitcher out of Texas. In Mayo’s last mock draft, he had the Pirates going for pitcher Cole Winn, also a high school pitcher. Two weeks ago, I profiled Rodriguez and Winn in the same article. I linked it below, but here it is again if you want to check out more on each player. That link has videos for both players.

Callis has Winn going 11th overall in his mock from yesterday. He also mentions that the Pirates could be interested in Carter Stewart or Ryan Weathers, two other prep pitchers. Both are featured in links below.

MLB Pipeline also posted an updated top 200 draft prospects. Mayo had an article to go along with the update and in it he notes that one of the biggest movers since the last update is Jake McCarthy. The Pirates selected him out of high school and were unable to sign him, mostly due to the draft bonus cap limiting what they could offer. McCarthy is now someone who they could end up taking with that 36th overall pick.

Here’s the updated top 200 list. In it, Grayson Rodriguez is ranked 22nd overall, which is the lowest of the four possibilities that Callis listed. Stewart ranks seventh, Winn is ninth and the lefty Weathers is 13th.

As mentioned above, the Pirates have the 36th overall pick, plus the will select 51st overall on day one of the draft. No mock drafts go that far and really it’s even more of a crap shoot the further you get from the top ten picks. For reference purposes though, and to see what kind of talent they are looking at, the 36th best prospect on the new Pipeline list is Tristan Beck. He’s profiled down below because he was making a move up the draft charts at that time. I don’t think he will be available at that spot, but he does have a bad back injury in his past, so that could keep him around undrafted longer. Check the link below for more details.

The 51st ranked player on the new Pipeline list is Griffin Conine (pictured above courtesy of David Hague), who also just happened to be profiled by us early in the process (see link below). He was rated much higher coming into the year, but really got off to a slow start. I don’t see him lasting this long either because he really turned things on over the last month and his numbers are now around where people expected them to be going into the year. He strikes out a lot, although he has cut back on that over this last month. Personally, I would consider Beck and Conine with the 36th and 51st picks to be outstanding picks if the Pirates could get them there.

Just the fact that Beck and Conine are rated in those spots, tells you that this draft has a lot of talent at the top and the Pirates should do very well with their first three picks on day one.